Religious Conflicts

The United States said it could launch air strikes and did not rule out cooperating with Iran to support the Iraqi government, after a rampage by Sunni Islamist insurgents across Iraq that has brought accusations of war crimes. Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have routed Baghdad's army and seized the north of the country in the past week, threatening to dismember Iraq and unleash all-out sectarian warfare with no regard for national borders. The fighters have been joined by other armed Sunni groups who oppose what they say is oppression by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a...

The United States said it could launch air strikes and act jointly with its arch-enemy Iran to support the Iraqi government, after a rampage by Sunni Islamist insurgents across Iraq that has brought accusations of war crimes.
Militants from the Islamic...

The United States is beefing up security at its embassy in Baghdad and will evacuate some workers out of the Iraqi capital, the U.S. State Department said on Sunday.
The move comes as Sunni insurgents seized a mainly ethnic Turkmen...

Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn received a robust re-election endorsement this week from dozens of Chicago area ministers, including at least two whose religious organizations got money from a much-criticized state anti-violence grant program.
Apostle Carl...

Iraqi Kurdish forces took control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk earlier Thursday, after government troops abandoned their posts in the face of a triumphant Sunni Islamist rebel march towards Baghdad that threatens Iraq's future as a unified state.
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Barack Obama threatened U.S. military strikes in Iraq on Thursday against Sunni Islamist militants who have surged out of the north to menace Baghdad and want to establish their own state in Iraq and Syria.
Iraqi Kurdish forces took advantage of the...

PARIS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - French police have arrested a man suspected of involvement in the shooting deaths last weekend of three people at Brussels' Jewish Museum, officials said on Sunday. The 29-year-old was arrested in the southern French city of...

NEW YORK -- Jurors began deliberations Tuesday in the terrorism trial of Sulaiman abu Ghaith, who is accused of being the chief propagandist for Al Qaeda in the days and months immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The jury broke Tuesday...

BEIJING – The eight knife-wielding attackers who went on a deadly rampage in a southwestern China train station had tried to leave the country several times but were unable to and then decided to “carry out ‘jihad’” in the city of Kunming, the Communist...

Exhibit Demonstrates Cross-Culture Collaboration In China During Holocaust CHICAGO -- A national exhibition entitled "Jewish Refugees and Shanghai", portraying the story of European Jews' immigration to Shanghai during the Holocaust, opened in...

In 1938, as a young boy, Frank Stern, now a Highland Park resident, watched the Nazis burn the synagogues in his hometown of Frankfurt and his brother and father taken away by the Gestapo during Kristallnacht, known as “The Night of the Broken Glass.” Two...

Author and activist Jonathan Wolfman has thoughtfully selected 60 essays from his approximately 1,500 on social justice with which to pass on a venerable tradition traceable to Parashat Shoftim in The Torah wherein we read "Tzedik tzedik tirdof"...

"This war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises …"
— Barack Obama, May 23
WASHINGTON — Nice thought. But much as President Barack Obama would like to close his eyes, click his heels three times and declare the war on terror...

A U.S. District judge today ordered that an Aurora teen continue to be detained on terrorism-related charges, reversing a decision a day earlier by a magistrate judge to allow him to go home to his family on 24-hour confinement.
U.S. District Judge...

Prosecutors fighting the release of an Aurora teen accused of signing up to fight for a terror group in Syria filed an appeal today calling him an advocate of "violent jihad" who "wanted to die killing others."In the 16-page appeal,...

An 18-year-old Aurora man with ties to a foiled attempt last year to bomb a downtown Chicago bar was arrested as he was about to travel to the Middle East to join the al-Qaida terrorist network, federal officials said Saturday.Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, a...

— The nation's vexation over the morality and legality of President Barack Obama's drone war has produced a salutary but hopelessly confused debate. Three categories of questions are being asked. They must be separated to be clearly understood.
1. By...

"Political theater" as a rubric covers a range of narrative tropes, but two current productions provide very different lenses for looking at the corrosive effects of achieving — and hanging onto — power at any cost.
"Leaves, Trees,...

A man threatened to blow up a CTA bus and told police he was "jihad against the white devil" this week, causing evening rush hour passengers to flee in fear for their lives, authorities said.A judge set bail at $90,000 Tuesday for Caleb Russell,...